No new weapons, no new enemies, no new gameplay...just unofficial clones of Asteroids and Space Invaders! How’s that for a sales pitch? Well, hey, they’re also free, of course. Plus the graphics and sound effects are a bit fancier. And who knows, maybe you’ve never played them...they’re kinda fun. These were actually programming exercises made in Unity (hence the names), mostly for the sake of learning the engine, as well as implementing 2D gameplay.

You can either play these games online, or download standalone versions. Playing online requires the Unity plug-in, which works on most browsers (desktop only — does not work on mobile devices). If you don’t already have the plug-in, it’s just a small one-time additional download, and works on Macs and Windows.

Controls

Press the Controls button on the title screen in either game to see the keyboard controls (if you're playing online, you'll need to click on the game window first before you can interact with anything). If you’re running the stand-alone versions, you can click on the Input tab in the start-up configuration window to customize the controls, although what the Controls button says won’t be accurate anymore if you do that. But that’s OK.

To start, click on the coin with the hand icon and drag it over the coin slot. Just like the real thing, eh? If you dwant to skip this, you can also start by pressing the fire button (the control key, by default). With the web version, you might have to wait a little before the game starts. The blinking text will tell you what percentage has loaded so far...in the meantime, you can play around with the coin. For a bit of fun, try pressing the right mouse button while holding the coin with the left mouse button (this won’t work in the web version unless you’re in full-screen mode).

Also if you’re running the stand-alones, you can pick the screen resolution for the game. For best results you should probably pick the same resolution as your desktop. There are various quality settings ranging from Fastest to Fantastic, although with these games there isn’t really a huge difference between them. The games won’t stress your machine too much, so feel free to use Fantastic. Press Command-F to toggle between full-screen and windowed mode, and Command-Q to quit.

Unitroids has a difficulty setting as well. (So the first paragraph at the top wasn't quite true — there is a gameplay enhancement!) Plus it remembers the top 20 scores; Unity Invaders just remembers the highest score. The web versions will keep track of your high scores too.